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Kentukis are a strange merge of Furbies, Social Media and Big Brother: little more than 'a cell phone on wheels', as one character remarks, that work as mechanical pets for their 'keepers', and as windows into another person's world for 'dwellers'. Keepers and dwellers do not receive any information about each other, and theoretically have few ways of communicating, seeing that kentukis can listen but not speak, and have no hands to write or type. But of course, human curiosity and inventiveness go a long way.

These gadgets have become a global phenomenon, from Hong Kong to Mexico, from Norway to Antigua, people become obsessed with them, fear them, experiment with them, develop businesses around them, turn them into art projects. Dwellers and keepers sometimes develop friendships, but more often than not there is something twisted about them, as one or the other becomes dominant, bullying, humiliating, blackmailing or terrifying the other.

Each pair of keeper-dweller is a story of their own, some only lasting a few pages, some running through the book. The book is quietly sinister, probably because Kentukis are not a exactly sci-fi: it is something that could exist, that almost exists. It does not take you for a rollercoaster, no profound revelation about humanity, no page-turning suspense, just the persistent feeling that something has gone awry in our relationship to technology, animals, and fellow human.

In this tiny book, two friends 'exchange monologues' about the pandemic. Both angry, frustrated, alienated by the lockdown. One is a journalist, writing piercing opinion pieces about government abuses and injustice. The other works, we assume, in a call centre, doing night shifts. As a kid, she survived the accident that took the lives of her mum and sister. The trauma has made her memory unreliable, causing her to confound the past, her dreams, and her present thoughts - in a daze that is brought to the extreme by her isolation and, finally, by Covid.

The two threads (the incident of the past, the pandemic today) don't really connect at a logical level, except perhaps through the notion of trauma and the loss of lucidity that often accompanies. It's angry, in a very relatable, painful, satisfying sort of way. How can a country be so fucked up? How can they be so greedy and cynical? (rarely have I thought of a they with such force before moving to Chile).

I loved this book so much! I found it entertaining and inspiring, personally (yes, I don't want to be stuck in a bullshit job, I want to think about what it's valuable and why and try to do it; see [*]), politically (hell yes, this system is fucked up, and all the moralising about work is very convenient for some) as well as professionally (I want to write like this about non-bullshit research).

The theory in a nutshell is that a larger and larger proportion of jobs, and especially white-collar jobs, are bullshit because they contribute nothing to society: they don't even make companies richer, but are simply the product of apathia or vanity. On a larger scale, this has happened because we are no longer living in a classic capitalist system, where capitalists 'control the means of production', but rather in a neo-feudal system, where political and economic elites coincide: people get richer by appropriating, distributing and controlling resources (i.e. politics in its classical definition), not by producing.

Introduction: Home The aim of the book is to examine the 'cultural, political and theoretical apparatuses that enable people and nations to construct a home on the ruins of other people's home, to feel that they belong to spaces of expulsion, or to develop an attachment to sites which subsequently – or even consequently – are transformed into sites of violence' (p. 3). The premise is that the home is a key site of colonialism not only of colonialism but also nation-building, because of its position and meaning in liberal political theory. Namely, the oikos as opposed to the polis. In these accounts, straight from Aristotle, the public sphere is where everyone (citizens) are supposedly equal, whereas the home is where difference justifies domination (e.g. over women, children and slaves). In this way, domination is framed as non-political, making space for the political ideals of universalism (see p. 8). The rest of the introduction considers the centrality of housing and building in Zionism (Zionism as a massive housing project to guarantee a home to every Jew), and its flipside, i.e. Zionism as a project of demolitions. It also acknowledges the limitations and challenges of describing Zionism as a settler-colonial project, and elegantly sidestep the debates suggesting it is one of many possible lenses that provides a partial understanding of what is going on, and suggesting that the means through which Zionism operates are surely borrowed / similar to other settler-colonial enterprises (among the critiques is the notion that settler-colonial serves to demonize, juxtaposed to the supposedly noble 'nation-building' – but is any give action, e.g. demolitions, less objectionable if it is not settler-colonial?).

Theoretical Overview: Violent Attachments This chapter is a review of how scholars / philosophers / political theorists have answered the question: how do political communities conceive / justify the mass-violence in which they engage? It proposes 3+1 models. The first three models cover the vast majority of the literature and revolve around: * compliance: e.g. theories that try to explain the behaviour of Germans during Nazism through bureaucratisation, ideology, blind obedience to authorities, etc. * cruelty: e.g. studies of lynching that highlight the enjoyment white people derived from watching Black people being beaten, killes, castrated, etc (often referring to some psychoanalytical dimension), and how that shared enjoyment provides a foundation of Whiteness.
* dissociation: arguably the model most associated with the literature on Israel/Palestine, suggests that violence is made endurable by producing a rift between that violence and the self, e.g. conceiving of violence as something that must be endured or disawoved, but that it is ultimately not defining 'us'. Examples vary from rejection of facts (Palestinians never existed), recognition of facts through frameworks that justify violence (it was either them or us, we are civilising them, etc), profession of shock at the excess of the occupation as a means to reaffirm one's own morality (individually, but also as a community), e.g. bad apples narrative.

For Kotef, all of these models are useful but insufficient. The issue with 1 is that it places violence as something outside of us, i.e. our 'natural' or 'real' way of being is non-violent. The issue with 2 is that it mostly work as an explanation for overt violence, but it is harder to apply to the vast majority of structural violence that happens in Israel/Palestine, where there is little to see (as a chilling counter-example, she mentions people gathering to watch and cheer Gaza bombings). The issue with 3, similarly to 1, is that there is some kind of contradiction between violence and the self, which in turn 'triggers' these processes of dissociation. And the corollary of this is that, if we force 'ourselves' to look and recognise the violence in which we are implicated, we will stop committing it. This hope is at the basis of many progressive projects, from reconciliation tribunals, to Breaking the Silence (my example), to efforts to document the Nakba by Israelis, etc. Kotef's argument is that this hope is necessary, but that there is the possibility that violence is not always in conflict with the self, and may at times be foundational to it.

Kotef suggests a fourth model, informed by feminist-queer theory, particularly Butler and Berlant. Namely, that subjects formed in conditions of violence (and aren't we all) come not only to desire violence, but are constituted by it. There is not I 'mislead' into violence because violence is part of that 'I'. I'm not entirely sure, but I think this is supposed to apply to all 'I's', not only settlers. What is distinctive about the settler-subjectivity is the relation to territory. In the case of settlers, identity is defined around attachment / belonging to a territory that is marked by violence. The settler does not necessarily desire violence in itself, does not necessarily enjoy it, but through her attachment to a territory produced through violence, it is defined by violence nevertheless: the settler's very existing is a form of violence (p. 49).

PART I. HOMES

Interlude. Home/Homelessness: A Reading in Arendt  The following chapter, Home/homelessness, discusses the relation between homes, states and politics in Arendt's work. A 101 reading of Arendt emphasizes the separation between a domestic and public sphere, and how the existence of the domestic in a precondition for politics. This is in line with the Enlightenment tradition (Locke) and Schmitt: at the beginning was a fence (physically, the wall delimiting the polis, more metaphorically, the law as a set of limitations that apply to a demarcated territory), defining the realm of politics.

For Arendt, stability is a precondition for politics. Physical homes are here the most basic unit of territory. In her writing on the origins of totalitarianism, Arendt famously suggests that WWI was an unprecedented tragedy because refugees, deprived of their homes and citizenship, were deprived of their most fundamental rights. While Arendt acknowledges that non-Europeans had already suffered the same fate, she famously writes that the tragedy began 'when Indians and Chinese were treated as though they were not human', implying it was somehow not as bad to treat Africans in this manner. Her justification seems to be that it is obvious that Indians and Chinese are indeed humans.

While many suggests the not-so-implicit rationale is based on racialized hierarchies that posits Europeans are the most humans of humans, Kotef turns to Arendt's other works to provide a more complex, yet still problematic interpretation. For Arendt, the reason why the European refugees' loss of home was more tragic, is that many Africans had never had a home, in the sense of a stable building that is not a tent or a hut (which of course isn't true). Here, her ranking of homeness based on building materials aligns with colonial understandings that saw indigenous homes made of mud or straw as a sign that their builders 'behaved as if they were part of nature', in juxtaposition to Europeans whose homes set them apart from nature (p. 63). Her account of Africans as homeless tribes, however, also includes Boers, who she sees as having abandoned their cultured agricultural wave of land due to the fact that the territory of Sub-Saharan Africa isn't suitable to agriculture (in an interesting geopolitical argument, see p. 65), roaming rootless like Black Africans. In this sense, it is not skin colour or genetics that defines a hierarchy of civilization. In fact, for Arendt it is precisely rootlessness, the lack of attachment to a particular territory, that produces tribalism and imperialism, leading the tribe (be they the Boers or Nazi Germans) to seek endless territorial expansion through the displacement of local residents to make room for members of the tribe. 'Racism, and perhaps even race, in this reading, is thus the product of a mode of territorialization that entails an unrelenting, ruthless, infinite desire for expansion' (p. 67, emphasis in the original).

Importantly she explicitly extended this argument to Israel and Zionism, suggesting that the construction of a Jewish homeland was fundamentally incompatible with any state formation premised on national / ethno-religious homogeneity, which would inevitably lead to the displacement of Palestinians. Arendt's first argument was that Israel would be militarily overwhelmed by Arab forces, but, she continues, even if it won the war, it would turn into a militarized state surrounded by enemies, 'a small warrior tribe' unable to root itself properly, and eventually clash with the Jews in the diaspora, rooted in other states.

The Consuming Self: On Locke, Aristotle, Feminist Theory, and Domestic Violences This chapter starts with a discussion of the relation between the private and public sphere according to Aristoteles and the liberal tradition that derives from it, including Arendt. There is a paradox here, or maybe just a tension, between the two spheres being fundamentally different and abiding by different logics, but also being co-constituitive, with one (households) being the basic units of the other (states). Then, Kotef turns to feminist scholars and activists who have questioned this distinction, or argued that the public sphere should be more like the household (sustained through relations of care, with women playing a role), or conversely that the domestic should be more like the public one (e.g. by communing chores and kitchens), or again that the domestic should remain protected by the violation perpetrated by state authorities (especially in Black feminism, where the home figures often as a site for sharing and empowerment).

Then, Kotef's turns to Locke, his theory of property and the way this was designed and used to justify the colonisation of America. In short, she proposes two alternative / complementary readings of Locke, revolving around two different principles that one could read as the cornerstone of property. The first, and most widely accepted, is labour. Locke essentially says that objects and lands belong to whoever first labours them. So, if one picks up an apple in a forest, that's hers. And, whoever first cultivates a piece of land should own it. As a master of post-rationalisation (my comment), Locke only applies this to white middle class men. Women and servants do not own the fruits of their labour because they are not conceived of as individual: implicitly the individual that is the protagonist of Locke writing is not really a person, but a household, and its head as a shorthand. American natives, on the other hand, only qualify when it comes to the property of objects (the apple in the example above), but not the land, because labour is defined so as to culminate with European agriculture and to exclude indigenous agricultural practices.

The second principle one can call into play is only implicitly present Locke (though, Kotef assures, we can trust he knew of it), and stems from Roman law. This is the principle of mixing, according to which if two materials are mixed to produce a new whole, then the resulting product belongs to whoever does the mixing. Locke often illustrates this through metaphors of digestion: after we have eaten something, that something becomes part of us. Because the new product needs to be a whole for the rule to apply, this principle only works in a context of enclosure. The flipside of digestion is the 'vomiting' of all that are not part of the enclosure and must be therefore be displaced, i.e. peasants in Europe and natives in the Americas. The gist, I think, is that the process of enclosure and displacement is foundational to Locke's theory of property, at least in this interpretation. So, in both readings, violence is at the core of property.

Epilogue. Unsettlement  The Epilogue to part one is titled Unsettlement, and it is a short, broad-stroke account of the relation between Palestinians and their homes, as well as the Israeli state and Palestinian homes. It start with a (somewhat vague, possibly romanticizing) reflection on how Palestinians' persisting attachment to the homes from which they have been evicted challenges state-borders, even if those homes have been destroyed, and even if refugees are claiming their right to be at home in the new places where they settled (diaspora or refugee camps). The second theme on which the chapter touches upon is how, while stately urban houses where claimed by Azekhenazi Jews, the majority of Palestinian homes were significantly more humble, and became inhabited by the growing Arab Jewish population. Sometimes this happened with the authorization or even on request of the state, who considered depopulated home a suitable temporary solution for new migrants. At times those homes were essentially squatted, defying orders from the state who would have preferred residents to go and settle border areas, or till the land. In both cases, what was envisioned as temporary became permanent, except that these sections of the Jewish population have also been subjected (and still are) to forced displacement to make space for gentrifying real estate projects. The final theme in the chapter is the extent to which the demolition of Palestinian homes is a cornerstone of the Israeli state-project. During the 1949 war, destruction of homes was relatively minimal; it was largely designed and implemented starting from the 1960s. More recently, the focus has shifted from the destruction of depopulated homes, to demolitions of inhabited homes declared illegal and, in the case of Gaza, the systematic bombing of homes and, following Weizman, the transformation of the built environment in a death trap for Gazans, who are mostly killed because their bombed homes collapse on them. In closing, Kotef notes how there is a contradictory desire to both erase the traces of this destruction, but also preserve and celebrate them, almost as if collective memory needed a proof that 'we did it'.

Part II. Relics

Interlude. A Brief Reflection on Death and Decolonization The Interlude between part one and part two is, as the title says, A brief reflection on death and decolonisation, considering how the settler can stop being a settler. The starting point is a play by Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs, which sounds fantastic. It's set in an imaginary decolonising African states, where various characters (blacks and whites) are caught in-between the fight for decolonisation. The crucial theme is that all whites are, in one way or the other, co-responsible or implicated in colonial violence, even when themselves support decolonisation. One of them, the wife of a missionary, ends up encouraging a black friend to participate in an action that, she knows, will involve attaching her own home. Having spent years building relations with the natives, learning from them and working with them on the land, she refuses to leave because, she insists, she's already at home, but is on some level accepting that her own death is 'just'. From here, Hagar considers the position of scholars such as Veracini, Mamdani and Zreik, who essentially argue that, once the structures of settler-colonialism are dismantled (ie. Once state institutions and laws are just), the difference between settler and native loses political saliency (e.g. you can kill the settler while saving the man). Kotef challenges this 'easy solution', not only because, as Marx had pointed out with regard to the Jewish question, there also needs to be a redistribution of economic resources (Marx had already pointed at the US as an example of a place where institutions and laws are theoretically 'equal for all', but racism is structural due to differences in economic power). But going further, Kotef speculates that even if laws were just and resources equally distributed, the settler would still be a settler because colonial violence 'is part of who they are', i.e. has shaped their “structures of feeling”, their attachment to the land and modes of relating. In other words, asking the settler to renounce them is to ask them to stop being who they are. But, against some theorists of decolonisation such as Albert Memmi, she also refuses the notion that leaving is the settler's best option, both on the grounds that indeed, that is their home by now, even if their belonging is premised on harming others and also because the possibility to leave is itself a privilege that is only available to few. It's a dead end, as Kotef concludes, but shouldn't plunge us in despair (the latter is more of a moral exhortation than a logical argument).

2. Home (and the Ruins That Remain) This section – Home (and the Ruins That Remains) – considers how Israeli Jews inhabit Palestinian ruins, both in a broad, almost-symbolic sense, i.e. how they live and come to feel at home in a landscape that is marked by evidence of the Nakba, and literally, i.e. how many families literally live in depopulated Palestinian houses. The chapter opens with some accounts of Palestinians who have visited their homes (either, literally, the homes from which their families were displaced, or more relatively, Palestinian ruins). Particularly striking is the description of some scenes from the movie Salt of This Sea, where American-Palestinian Soraya encounters Jewish Israeli Irit, who lives in what used to be Soraya family's home in Jaffa. Irit is hospitable, even kind, expressing (limited) sympathy for the fate of Soraya's family. But of course this is in itself a complicated gesture, as being hospitable presumes that it is clear / reasserts who is the guest and who is the host (p. 139). After their exchange, Soraya leaves and vomits; Hagar also feels like vomiting and wishes Irit would vomit too – with vomit being a way to acknowledge and simultaneously refuse her identity as settler-coloniser (p. 159). But she doesn't.

In some sense, the image of the depopulated Palestinian house inhabited by Israelis works as a 'parable' (p. 142) meant to highlight how it is not really possible for Israelis not to know and not to see (the violence upon which their homeland and thus their identity is based). Here, Kotef draws also an analogy between her own argument about Zionism, and Wendy Brown's understanding of liberal identity as constituted through wounded attachments (p. 142). Zionism, she argues, imagines itself as something (liberal, progressive, democratic, leftist) that is fundamentally at odds with its present form and what underpins it (exclusive citizenship, violence). Later in the chapter, she develops this to essentially argues that, on some level, Zionism (and settler colonialism more generally) are paradoxical in their desire to undermine their own foundations: the goal of the settler-colonial state is to completely eliminate (through physical elimination or integration) the native – and thus essentially to stop being a settler-colonial state.

Most Israelis inhabiting Palestinian depopulated houses are left-leaning Ashkenazi, or at least that's the section of the population on which Kotef focuses (and, she argues, there is a logic to that, since from the outset allowing Arab Jews to live Arab houses seemed dangerous, posing the risk that they would preserve their Arab identity in addition to or even over their Jewish identity). Many of this people, like Irit, have a somewhat sincere desire for peace and justice, and do feel sorry for the fate of Palestinians. In some cases, they even have personal memories of the pain that comes from being forced to live their homes (e.g. in Eastern Europe) and seeing them inhabited by someone else. But their desire and sorrow don't translate into questioning their own identity and relative complicity in the violence.

On p. 148-151 there is an interesting historical overview of the treatment of depopulated houses: already during the war, depopulated houses were made available for new migrants or soldiers, first in mixed cities and then also in Palestinian towns and villages. After the war (1950), the Development Authority regularised the transfer of Palestinian property into its own (governmental) hands. While urban homes were often repopulated, most village houses were destroyed and replaced with new building. So, Palestinian ruins were either overlaid with new constructions, or integrated in the landscapes through parks. Intact buildings were often used by Israeli institutions, or destroyed.

The following section revisits writings of early Zionists like Herzl, noting how, upon visiting Palestine for the first time, they (1) did not like it and described it as dirty and uncivilized and/or (2) remarked on how the land was already taken (by Arabs).

Alongside the literal appropriation of Palestinian homes (at times complete, chillingly, with pots and pans and other objects that became 'memorabilia' or were eventually 'gotten rid of'), we also see the cultural appropriation of Palestinian architecture (and a similar argument could be made about food, dress, vocabulary, symbols, etc (see footnotes on p. 174 for some sources). Here, a first moment of rejection of all that was Arab in favour of European forms that would better suit the (European) Jew, is followed by the pursuit of belonging (p. 160) through the embracing of Palestinian vernacular materials, shapes and techniques, which are however recast as 'Mediterranean' and, ultimately, uniquely Israeli. Thus Palestinian ruins – violently emptied of people – are aesthetics in order to decontextualise them (hence campaign to preserve depopulated villages based on their heritage value, without reckoning of why they are depopulated in the first place) – indeed, this example shows how is the act of demolition itself that allows the attractiveness of Palestinian houses to be recognised in the first place. Kotef's argument is what is appropriated is a trace of violence and thus, through the appropriated object, violence itself is also appropriated and become a key part of the newly emerging 'hybrid' Israeli identity (175).

The chapter is also a critique of the many authors (notably Benvenisti) who described the establishment of the Israeli-state as a process of erasure of Palestinians (through demolitions, cartographic and toponymic violence, etc), suggesting that claiming that one could not see is a too convenient a partial truth.

Epilogue. A Phenomenology of Violence: Ruins I have skimmed over the epilogue to this part, which I essentially read as a theoretical argumentation about why ruins are not only symbols of past violence, but are continuation of violence into the present.

Part III. Settlement

Interlude. A Moment of Popular Culture: The Home of MasterChef  This interlude discusses a settler's participation in Israeli Masterchef. Nizri is a religious, ideological settler, who has been evicted from Amona (the last settlements in West Bank to be evicted as part of post-Oslo disengagement – even if residents where then offered alternative accommodation in a new purpose-built settlement). Kotef describes Nizri TV appearance as part of a more or less coordinated strategy of normalisation of settlements, a (largely successful) attempt at 'settling' the hearts of 'normal' Israelis. The discussion revolves around (1) Nizri self-presentation as a victim, which amply allowed and even embraced by the programme. Here, controversially, Kotef is very generous in extending her empathy to settlers who have indeed lost their house, their labour of years, and a place to which they had an undeniable sense of attachment. She is careful not to deny any of these circumstances and their pain, and focuses instead to the absurdity of centering their experience over the much more systematic and tragic faith of Palestinians in many West Bank villages. (2) The mild confrontation between Nizri and one of the judges, who – coming to embody the liberal left - is put off by Nizri's identity as a settler and his religious background, but ultimately refuses to see any continuity between Nizri's actions and his own position as a settler. (3) the use of food, particularly food that has Arab roots (pita), shared meals and cooking as means to emphasise a shared identity and normalise the occupation, essentially implying that political confrontation would disrupt the coming together of diverse parts of Israeli society (like in the military, quote) and that's a negative thing.

Perhaps especially relevant is the characterisation of home-building as a normalising strategy (to paraphrase: a settler who camps out and sleeps with a rifle is still to some extent an extremist and warmonger, but if Nizri lived in a normal house, had a large kitchen and used it to cook Shabbat dinners for his large family and community, then he is 'one of us'). Also interesting is how the use of specific ingredients (such as foraged herbs) and the offering of wine are presented by Nizri as proves of his attachment to the land (in a way the mirrors Palestinian nostalgia for lost landscapes, but obviously stems from a very different structural position) [206-208] This theme of violent domesticity also returns in chapter 3 (p 235), where Kotef writes: <> (emphasis in the original).

On Eggs and Dispossession: Organic Agriculture and the New Settlement Movement  Chapter three, On Eggs and Dispossesion, turns to a different settlement, namely Israel's largest organic egg farm, built on the hilltops near Nablus by another ideological settler, notorious for his violence (again Palestinian, but also other Jews) and overt racism. The main theme here is the role of agriculture as a technology for territorial expansion (in a reversal of the classical geopolitical reasoning according to which territorial expansion is needed to feed a polity through agriculture, lebensraum-style). This happens very concretely in as far as, due to a 1979 court case (Ello Moreh, see p. 243), it was established that land confiscated for military purposes cannot be used for settlement. As a result, agriculture has been since then the mean legal means for land grab (here Kotef relies extensively on Weizman). In addition, Israel also exploited Ottoman-era regulations that allowed the state to expropriate uncultivated land. In the West Bank, most hill-tops are unsuited for cultivation because too rocky, but obviously strategic from a military and water management point of view. Chicken coops lend themselves to be used for occupying such rocky grounds. What is more, since (organic) chicken farming is space-intensive (one needs space to let chicken out) but requires relatively little labour, it allows few people to occupy a lot of ground (p. 246). An interesting aspect here (and also in the interlude) is the relation between settlers and the state, in its many faces and institution. Kotef here highlights a shift from 'a rhetoric of evacuation' (the state claiming evacuation was needed but without doing anything about it) to 'a rhetoric of regulation and legalization' (p. 225). Nevertheless, much of the state support has remained informal and 'off the records' (physically protecting settlers, providing infrastructures, etc). Kotef also describes a trend towards increased 'symbiosis of state and individualised violence', leading to a situation where Area C is effectively managed by paramilitary settler groups, protected and at times actively supported by the army (p 247).

On p. 236, Kotef refers to the notion of domopolitics, drawing on William Walters. Domopolitics refers to 'a form of territorial control in which 'warm words'of community, trust and citizenship are juxtaposed with the sense of insecurity, threat and radical externality from which the 'inside' must be protected'. Perhaps this could be a useful concept for the analysis.

Epilogue. An Ethic of Violence: Organic Washing The other theme that runs through Part 3 and is then tackled head on in the epilogue is the notion that organic agriculture also provides an ethical justification of the occupation. In the view of this religious settler, organic farming becomes a 'natural' way to manage the land, where some violence is inevitably and indeed conforms to the right, natural way of doing things. So, for example, old chickens who can no long lay eggs must be killed. And Palestinians who are on our land must be displaced. It is sort of a bit sad, but it is also how things are. Furthermore, organic farming stresses notions of rootedness and connection to the land, which arguably always have a sinister connotation but become obviously violent in this context.

Conclusion The conclusion is very short, and essentially foregrounds the paradoxical or dilemma-like nature of the book's argument, namely that the settler cannot renounce violence without renouncing her identity. But if we (Kotef, Said and I) do not wish to see the settlers leave (where to?) or being killed, the what does that entail? Kotef is frankly unsure about it, but something along the lines of recognizing this is the situation, and then building a new political reality where a new individual and collective identity is possible for Israelis.

Yehudà Kaminka returns to Israel after years of absence to obtain a divorce because, as we are soon to find out, he's about to have a kid. Each chapter covers one of the nine days leading up to Jewish Easter, and revolves around a different member of his disfunctional Israeli family: his grandson, son and daughter in-law, his wife (locked up in a mental institution), his daughter and his two sons. All of them are very three-dimensional and flawed human beings. It is a masterfully constructed family-saga, and even if I started to lose interest in the second half, that has probably more to do with my mood than the book.

Masteful or not, however, this book is pretty problematic. The two gay men in it (the youngest son and an older ultra-orthodox man who is madly in love with him) are duplicitous and pathetic, respectively. Given the book was originally written in the 1980s, that's pretty rubbish. But not as rubbish as the fact that there are basically no Palestinians in the story (except, I think, a serviceable waiter at one point). There is clearly so much affection for Israel, and so much head-shaking about this problematic, not-fully-realised homeland for the Jewish people, but without any doubt about in the righteousness of Zionism. I think Yehoshua was the quintessential left-wing Zionist, desiring peace and coexistence while embracing Jewish/Israeli nationalism, and the idea that the Jewish diaspora is falling short of some ideal of strong Jewishness. At this point in time, it is hard to be understanding of this view. I originally read this book in my first year at university, and loved it.

This was a great book - it explains Marxist theorist in a clear and compelling fashion, using a lot of examples from recent and not so recent history. But it isn't simplistic, or even simple: it actually makes for quite a challenging read. The tone of a 'call to arms' may irritate or alienate someone who doesn't already identifies with the left, but then again, maybe this book is not written for them.

CHAPTER ONE: The Birth of Capital This chapter defines capitalism and puts it into historical context. Marx defined capitalism as a social relation of production. This means that, as Thier puts it, “that profits are not the result of good accounting or the inventive ideas of the superrich, but are instead the outcome of an exploitative relationship between two classes of people: bosses and workers”.

The standard right-wing narrative about wealth inequalities is that rich people are rich because they earned it. A popular variation on this plot is that rich people are rich because their forefathers earned it. Instead, the book presents a sketch of the violent process of enclosures in Europe, whereby the ruling classes took by force land and resources that were previously held in common. (this part covers much of the same ground as Trespassing). Thus, while under feudalism lords used explicit force to coerce people into working and/or paying them tributes, “capitalism created a new underclass of wageworkers—a class of people theoretically free to work where and how they pleased, but who would in practice be compelled—by economic necessity—to produce a surplus for someone else nonetheless”.

Here is the link between capitalism and liberalism: capitalism is based on the fact that workers, no longer in control of the means of production (the tools and resources necessary to make things), need employment; but also on the illusion that they are free individuals, choosing to work and selling their labour on a more or less fair market. Quoting directly from Marx: “For the transformation of money into capital, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labor-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labor-power.”

Key points: - capitalism is a social relation of production, whereby capitalists exploit workers who need employment to survive - it isn't natural or eternal: it is barely a couple of centuries old, and developed through a violent process of land enclosures

CHAPTER TWO: The Labour Theory of Value This second chapter illustrates the labour theory of value (LToV), which is at the core of Marxist economic thinking. It also defined many key concepts that one is bound to encounter over and over again when reading about the economy.

The LToV is an explanation for how wealth is created. Marx did not invent the LToV, which, in fact, was widely popular in his times, even among theorists of capitalism such as Adam-Smith. He did, however, draw out its political implications, i.e. the fact that it is workers, not capitalists, who produce wealth.

For Marx, commodities are the fundamental basic units of wealth under capitalism ““The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.”. So what are commodities?

A commodity can be defined as "something that was made through human labor, satisfies a demand, and is produced for the purpose of exchange”. Already we see that there are two aspects here: a commodity must satisfy a demand, i.e. have a use value, and it must be made for the purpose of trade, i.e. have an exchange value. We also see that labour is what creates commodities, and thus wealth.

More specifically, according to the LToV, “a commodity’s [exchange] value in relation to other commodities is determined by how much labor has gone into producing it” or, to be precise, by the socially-necessary labour time, i.e. how long it takes, on average, to produce a comparable commodity (under capitalism, being an especially slow carpenter doesn't warrant charging more for the same chairs).

Granted, the exchange-value of a commodity must cover for other costs: raw materials, tools and technologies. But ultimately these are also produced through labour, and can therefore be computed as labour-time. So, to return to the chair example, its socially-necessary labour time includes not only the hours needed to make it, but also those needed to extract the wood, make the saw, nails and hammer, etc. In other words, exchange-value is an approximated representation of socially-necessary labour time.

It is a representation because labour creates value, but is not itself value. To be value, it needs to be objectified, to be 'congealed' into a commodity and considered in the abstract. Actual labour-time is too diverse and specific to work as a measure of exchange: how many hours down a mine are worth how many hours kneading bread or performing heart surgeries? For this reason, Marx talks of human-labour-in-the-abstact to refer to “labor as a general power abstracted from all its specific form”.

A final important point made in this chapter (and further developed in the next one) is that exchange-value is not the same as price. Indeed, prices (or rather, money) hides the relation between things and people (workers), it “conceals the true nature of value, so that when you go to the supermarket, you don’t think you’re trading an equivalent amount of your “congealed mass of labor” with someone else’s”. So, money reframes social relations (between people) as economic relations (between money and commodities ). Or, as Marx has it “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Marginalism: Nowadays, mainstream economists tend to explain the production of wealth through the theory of marginalism. This theory effectively assumes that prices are determined by a balancing act between the interests of sellers and buyers. Thier gives the following, clarifying example. A thirsty person is looking to buy a bottle of water. Let's say that she's willing to pay up to 3 dollars for that bottle, because she really can do with the water. After that first purchase, however, she will not pay the same for a second bottle, and even less for the tenth one. On the other hand, the water company needs more and more money to produce more and more bottles: purchasing more raw materials, machinery and space. So, if we are plotting supply and demand on two curves, the first will be raising, the second falling. Prices reach an equilibrium when the two curves meet. This is clearly a simplification, but one that highlights genuine weaknesses of this theory. The first is that it doesn't consider how producing a lot of bottles is cheaper than producing a few (perhaps not overall, but if we consider the cost per bottler). Second, Thier notes that marginalism assumes the labour market also works in this way: wages reach an equilibrium when the interests of workers and employers meet. This assumption, however, overlooks the fact that, while a water company can choose to back away from a deal, many workers are forced to take whichever job they can get, or they will starve. More generally, the problem is that marginalism imagines a world where free individuals negotiate on equal footing, rather than one divided into class with uneven power and access to resources.

Key points: - under capitalism, wealth is the sum of commodities, and commodities are the product of human labour - the exchange-value of different commodities can be compared by considering how much abstract labour has gone into making them

CHAPTER THREE: Money This chapter deals with what is money, and what is its relationship to exchange-value. It opens with the rather great quote from the Capital, Vol. 11: “We see then that commodities are in love with money, but that “the course of true love never did run smooth.”“.

If exchange-value is an abstract representation of human labour, then money is the physical format that exchange-value takes in contemporary society. Mainstream economists would argue that money facilitate trade by making commodities commensurable. However, as explained in the previous chapter, for Marx commodities are already commensurable since they are all 'masses of congealed human labour'. Money simply represent a standard measure of 'congealed labour'. It not only makes it easier to calculate how much a commodity is worth, but also helps to move value geographically (I can sell my chair factory here, and buy some cows oversea) and store it over time (I can sell my milk now, and save up for when I'm older).

Marx (and Thier) provide a detailed explanation for how money came to represent value. Marx starts from the equation: "20 yards of linen = 1 coat". In this equation, the yards of linen are the commodity we want to exchange. Its value is a relative value. The value of the coat is the equivalent value, i.e. the term of comparison. One cannot express relative values without equivalent values: the question of 'how much are worth 20 yards of linen' can only be answered by using a term of comparison, be it a coat, a pair of shoes, or five sacks of flours.

Now, if I'm interested in the linen for its use-value, i.e. because I need to make myself a new shirt, what I want is linen, not shoes or flour. But if I'm interested in the linen for its exchange-value, i.e. as an investor, then the particular form of commodity doesn't matter: I don't care if I'm trading linen, coats, shoes or flour. What matter is the abstract human labour objectified in each commodity. The specific equivalences don't matter: I need a general measure of value. This could be any commodity: linen, gold or silver. Or slips of paper issued by the state. This is what money is.

Money is a measure of exchange-value. Prices, however, are not the same of the value imbued in a commodity through labour. The value of a specific commodity is essentially stable (it changes, but slowly, over the course of months or years), since it is determined by socially necessary labor-time; prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly. This can be because of sudden swings in supply and demand (think of face masks at the start of the pandemic), or because the value of money itself has changed.

Key points: - Money is a measures of exchange-value, that facilitates exchanges (essentially severing the link between commodities and their use-value?) - Prices reflect the value of commodities, but fluctuate depending on other factors

CHAPTER FOUR: Where do Profits Come From? So far, the book has covered what commodities are, and what is money's relationship to them. This chapters considers profits under capitalism. In our world, the bulk of the economy is not made up of carpenters making chairs and exchange them for coats, or even money; instead, we have a capitalist systems where, broadly speaking, some people own (or invests in) companies, and others work in those companies for a living. Workers are paid a wage, but do not own the fruits of their labour - owners sell these products and make a profit from it.

In a barter economy, such as the one assumed in chapter two, commodities (C) are exchanged for commodities of equal value (C'): C <-> C'.
In a money-based economy, the exchange is slightly different: C <-> M <-> C'

In both types of exchange, however, no one makes a profit, since all the good exchange all have the same value. Sure, a dishonest or cunning merchant could get away with an advantageous deal, but that means their counterpart is make a loss. The overall wealth in circulation remains the same. By contrast, modern capitalism - on this Marxist and mainstream economists agree, is characterised by a great expansion of wealth. In other words, capitalists invest money in the production of commodities, and then sell those commodities for more money, not because they are cheating customers but because what they sell is more valuable. The formula above is reversed, since money is no longer an intermediary of exchanges, but the very reason why exchanges happen: M <-> C <-> M'

The difference between M and M' is called surplus value. So what is happening at that 'C' stage (i.e. during production)? Capitalists invest their money in two special types of commodities: means of production (e.g. machinery, tools, technologies) and labour power. For Marx, capitalism has turned the capacity to work into a commodity, but one with a peculiar characteristic: its use-value is itself a source of value. Its exchange value is the wage paid to the worker. So, the worker is paid for her time, but as she works, she produces more value.

Labour's exchange value is determined by 'the value of the means of subsistence habitually required by the average worker', i.e. by the cost of living (minus the cost of unpaid reproductive labour historically performed by women, such as caring for children or cooking). It is always inferior to the value the worker generates, otherwise there would be no point in employing her. Let's say I work a 8 hour shift at Starbucks, from 8-16, earning 10$ an hour. By ten in the morning, I have probably compensated Starbucks for my wage through my labour. The value I produce during the rest of my shift, goes entirely into Starbucks' pockets (sure, minus overheads and fixed costs). Marx calls the work performed to sustain the worker necessary labour, the work performed for the profit of the capitalist surplus labour.

Neoclassical economics has different ways of explaining profits. A popular one is to suggest that capitalists are smart in their investments: they see opportunities that other have not seen, know where to find the best raw materials and how to sell it at the highest possible prices, and it is through these 'tricks' that returns are generated. A fundamental problem with this theory is that it fails to explain how the system expands as a whole. It also doesn't really explain why whole sectors, and even entire economies, go through very profitable phases.

Marx calls the capital invested in labor-power variable capital (because it reproduces itself + surplus value); the capital invested in equipment and materials is called constant capital. It is true that investment in constant capital 'reappers' in the produced commodities: I can 'regain' the money I spent buying a saw by selling my chairs, but in and of itself the saw isn't producing extra value: “Money advanced to purchase equipment and materials, however, passes its value on to the newly created goods without any quantitative change in its worth. “. In fact, the value of constant capital decreases over time: through wear and tear, and also because newer technologies undergo depreciation as they become outdated.

So, to sum up, capitalists invest their money in means of production and labour power, purchasing constant and variable capital, respectively. Variable capital reproduces produces surplus values, generating profits:

M -> MoP + LP -> C -> M'

The rate of surplus value, or rate of exploitation, is the ratio between the part of the day that creates the workers' wages, and the part of the day that generates profit for the owners. So, in the Starbucks example above, it would be 8/2=4 (400%). The rate of profit is the ratio of surplus value to capital, i.e. the return on the initial investment, taking into account fixed costs.

Several processes can help to increase the rate of exploitation:

• strategies to improve productivity, such as tight work routines made up of micro-tasks performed over and over without thinking (taylorism)

• deskilling, i.e. breaking down a task into simpler ones that can be made without special training

• lowering the general standards of living, and therefore the costs of social reproduction: if it becomes accepted that eating canned beans 5 nights a week counts as making a living, then we can lower wages

• shifting the costs of social reproduction onto workers: forcing workers to rely on benefits (financed through taxes, e.g. by workers) or debt to get by *****

An important implication of this is that everyone who works for a wage is part of the working class. Class is a relationship of exploitation, not an identity trait. It doesn't matter if I work in a factory, at Starbucks, in a school or in a hospital, if I earn 5 or 20$ an hour, nor if I like reggaeton & hot dogs or jazz & oysters. “Income levels, education, lifestyles, and patterns of consumption are used to divide people into a society that is mostly middle class, with some rich and poor people around the fringes.”

For Marxist economics, instead, the middle class includes a smaller segment of society, made up of professionals (e.g. doctors and lawyers), managers and small business owners. Indeed, the working class is expanding, as professions nurses, programmers, academics are 'squeezed' more and more to turn a profit.

CHAPTER FIVE: The Accumulation of Capital This chapter deals with the inescapable drive towards capital accumulation or, to put it simply, why capitalists don't have the option to 'play nice' and must compete with one another.

As seen in chapter four, capitalists invest money in the production of commodities, which they then sell for more money. The last passage in this equation, however, is far from guaranteed: M <-> C ??? M'

For example, another company could produce a higher quality product at a cheaper price; or the product in question could suddenly go out of fashion (think of all those unsold skinny jeans) or be superseeded (as it happened to VHS or Kodak camera films); or an economic crisis could mean people spend less.

As a general pattern, high initial investments can help to reduce these risks:

• companies that can invest in technological development can often lower the costs of production by acquiring more efficient machinery, or by optimising costs through economies of scale (“cost advantages gained through operational efficiencies and economic leverages”, for example, I can get my row materials for cheap because I buy so much of it)

• they also can secure a market share through innovation: when Apple developed the first iPhone, it was a product that did not exist and people wanted

When capitalists sell commodities, the part of surplus value they keep for themselves is called revenues. The part that is employed as capital (reinvested) is accumulated. Clearly, the more I earn, the more I accumulate, and thus the more likely it is that I can survive another cycle. It is not possible for a company to say: we have a good product, profits are good, let's continue at this pace, because competitors are constantly working on lowering the prices / improving performances so that they can conquer our share of the market.

According to Marx, then, competition is hardwired into capital societies. There are many positive consequences: we have witnessed unprecedented technical developments and increase in wealth. But competition also creates this system that rewards exploitation rather than empathy or fairness. Famously, Marx talks of a world in constant flux, where all that is solid melts into air:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” *****

We can thus think of capital as self-expanding, in the sense that it 'naturally' tends to grow with each cycle of production. Let's say I invest 2000$ in my chair production company, and, within a year, after paying my employees and overhead costs, I have made 3000$. I can now invest 3000$ to hire more workers, or buy a faster saw. Thanks to these improvements, by the end of the year I'll have made 5000$, which I can again put into my business to increase the profits. As Marx puts it, “each accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation”. This trends leads to the concentration of capital in the hands of individual capitalists: money (capital) begets more money (capital).

Successful companies accumulate more capital because they generate surplus value. However, there is also another process at play (which Marx calls centralization): they also tend to destroy their competitors, becoming richer by expropriating other capitals. A great example of this is today's tech sector, where a few giants incorporate new start-ups and platform companies. According to Thier (and Marx) this isn't an aberration: it is a law of capitalism that, over time, every sector tends to become dominated by a few giants.

This is one of the paradoxes of capitalism: competition leads to concentration and centralization, ultimately leading to monopolies that no longer need to compete. *****

CHAPTER SIX: Capitalist Crisis If chapter five discusses capitalism's drive towards wealth accumulation, chapter six tackles its flip side, i.e. its crisis tendencies. According to Marx, crisis are momentary, violent solutions to capitalism inherent contradictions: they serve to prolong the life of capitalism by restoring some sort of precarious equilibrium. They're part of the system core: not an aberration caused by external factors, but in the nature of capitalism.

So, what are these contradictions?

First, there is the fact that capitalism separates the creation of surplus value (through the exploitation of labour during production) from the realisation of surplus value through sales. These two actions happen at different moments and generally in different places, leaving open”the potential for a breakdown in the conversion of the manufacture of goods to their realization in sales.”. This is the same point brought up in chapter five: if I invest in the production of VHS and they become outdated before I can sell them, I'm making a big loss.

Second, because capitalists must 'expand or perish', any limitation to this expansion is seen as a barrier to be overcome. There is not attempt to assess the needs of society or the limits to the market. Historically (and logically), demand drives supply: humans produce what they need. But under capitalism, needs are created so that products can be sold. Generally speaking, capitalists produce more and more, but there comes a point where they hit against a limit in the market's capacity to absorb commodities (for example, because workers can no longer afford to by them). The absurdity of this is made clear by the 2008 housing bubble. This was a crisis of overproduction, in the sense that there too many houses that went unsold because no one could buy them. At the same time, however, homelessness increased dramatically, suggesting that there was indeed a need for homes. “(...)economic crises under capitalism are not the result of too few goods, but of too few profits”

Third, the rate of profit in any industry tends to diminish over time (importantly, this is a tendency, not a general law). In a nutshell: capitalists invest in labour-saving technologies to save on workers' salaries; the first to innovate can save on salaries and thus increase their profits. But this increase is only temporary: soon enough, prices are driven down by competition, as other companies acquire the same technologies and try to reconquer their lost share of the market. Here, it is important to remember that, as seen in chapter four, profits come from the exploitation of labour: it isn't possible to exploit a machine. Capitalists can offset this drop in profits by (a) exploiting even more the few workers they employ, e.g. by lowering wages or increasing working hours or moving production somewhere cheaper (b) speed up the turnover rate (making less profits, but faster), for example by selling more goods (for example, pushing products in new markets).

Fourth, capitalists must produce with little knowledge of future demand, and when a change happens, it takes them time to adjust (for example, it isn't easy to reconvert a factory to produce a different type of commodity). *****

Say's law is an influential principle of mainstream economics (though it is refuted by 'leftwing' economists such as Keynes). It argues that supply and demand exist in equilibrium: there may be fluctuations, but in the long term the market will balance things off. The idea here is that, after I have made money from selling my commodities, I will use that money to buy commodities (if I hold on to it, it could lose its value). If this was true, it would mean that there is no such thing as overproduction. But capitalists do often sit on their money, especially when the economy is weak and it investments promise little profit.

*****

Capitalist cycles unfold as follows:

1. "healthy economy": profits are strong, capitalists invest in production, some sections of the working class may see a rise in salary and increase their consumption

2. this situation encourages further investments and expansion of production, and the boom of one sector drives expansion in other sectors (e.g. expansion of car manufacturing leads to expansion in steal production).

3. because it takes time of industries to scale up production, demand tends to be greater than supply. This means producers can charge more for their commodities, meaning profits are high, meaning investments flow, regardless of effective demand.

4. the market reaches a saturation point

5. even when capitalists realise saturation has been reached (and this can take quite some time), they are reluctant to scale back production, because that would mean make a sure loss, and allow competitors to expand their market share. So, those who can afford it, accept lower returns, or even no returns, hoping to drive their competitors to failure

6. eventually, prices drop, as all producers try to get rid of their stocks and still make some money

7. investments dry up, since profit margins are low or inexistent. Factories go idle, capitalists let their money rest in their accounts.

8. there is a problem of overaccumulation: capitalists have invested in technologies, factories and materials that cannot be used, and are bound to depreciate. The scaling down of production implies a destruction of capital: buildings are abandoned or destroyed, goods are dumped (for example, milk is poured away).

9. the crisis lay the basis for a new phase of growth: the corporations that survive inherit a 'looser market' with little competition, workers accept lower wages because the alternative is unemployment, raw materials and machinery are cheap (because there is an oversupply)...

10. back to square one

According to (Thier's interpretation of) Marxist theory, these cycles create situation where it may be easier or harder to overthrown capitalism. A revolution is only possible through human agency, but workers can take advantage of crises to 'seize power'.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Credit and Financialization This last chapter deals with the role of credit in capitalist systems. “Simply put, credit is capital lent” be it in the form of loans, stocks, bonds or mortgages. “Bonds are publicly traded debt. Essentially a company is borrowing from public markets by issuing certificates that it agrees to repay at a set time, with a set amount of interest. Stocks on the other hand, are claims to the total value of a company (its assets minus its debts, or “equity”). Each share is a claim to a fraction of the company’s worth.”

Credit is crucial to capitalist expansion, because it allows companies to invest in production before they realise profits through exchange. It isn't a coincidence that the finance industry was born as the same time as capitalism!

Finance works in a slightly different way than other capitalist industries. Finance capitalists do not invest in the production of their own good or services, but in enabling others to produce, taking a cut from their profit in the form of interests. Rather than using money to produce commodities and generate more money, they essentially exchange money for more money, leaving production to someone else.

“Marx explained the relationship between the creation of value and credit as that of fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is not real, existing capital, but claims on future capital.”.

Banks play an important role in capitalism because they facilitate the circulation of capital:

1. they collect sums of money into a big pool, so that is can be used in production (our savings are not enough to fund a new business, but combined with many other people's they add up)

2. they make them available to the right people (if we teamed up with our friends and family and decided to invest, we wouldn't no how to start - the banks find lenders and vet them)

Finance also allows “a whole class to own an economy's productive assets”. I understand this to mean: without finance, each capitalists would own one, two or three hundreds companies; by investing in stocks and bonds, the ruling classes can effectively have shares in the economy as a whole.

The problem is that credit incentivise risky behaviours in periods of economic growth (because capitalists who take great risks stand to make large profits), but dries up in periods of recession, further impeding production. Or, to quote the Financial Times (!) “[banks] tend to over-extend themselves in the good times an are over-cautious in the bad, exacerbating booms and busts”.

Since the 1970s (thank you neoliberalism), we have seen a tremendous expansion and deregulation of financial markets, leading to the "securitization of everything". To securitize means to turn debt into a financial product that can be bought and sold. Some types of securities are not new: bond and stocks are also securities. But many of the new types of security are derivative, meaning they derive their value from an underlying asset (I didn't fully understand this, but I think it means that their value does not directly depend on the value of commodities: with derivatives, one can make a profit from falling prices or failed loans. An historical example of derivatives are bucket shops, where gains depended on betting on prices levels).

Examples of derivatives:

• CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) are packages of bits and pieces of thousands of loans, organised in 'tranches' representing different levels of risk. Buyers purchase the right to collect interests on these loans. The riskier tranches obviously yields higher interests, creating an incentive to push risky loans. The assumption is that some loans will go into defaults, but the hit will be spread among many investors, and offset by the interests on the other loans.

• CDSs (Credit Defaults Swaps) are a form of insurance on securities: an investor who has purchased a package of loans can pay a third party a small shares of the interests he acquires, in exchange for the promise that the third party will compensate him if the security failed. Unsurprisingly, when there is a financial crash (hi 2008!), said third parties find themselves on the hook for a more money than they can pay. To make matters worse, CDS market are not bound to the typical rules of insurance: ”Traditionally, the way insurance works is that you have to actually own an asset to purchase insurance for it. So, for example, you are not allowed to buy a fire insurance policy on your neighbor’s house and then collect on it if your neighbor’s house is destroyed. (Such an arrangement would not only incentivize arson, it would also be disastrous for insurance companies who could then be on the hook for many insurance payouts from the destruction of just one house.)
  But none of this was true for the CDS market. Instead, it was perfectly legal to buy credit default swaps on assets you didn't own” (In fact, in 2007 there were many more CDSs than actual securities.) This process of securitisation also led to the proliferation of new intermediaries, such as shadow banks (financial institutions that perform bank-like activities but are not regulated as banks) and structured investment vehicles (SIVs), which are essentially shadow banks set up by bank themselves to obscure the amount of shady securities they had been purchasing. The rest of the chapter reconstructs how we got to the 2008 Great Recession. I'm skipping it here, but the gist is: These new instruments (coupled with a phase of economic prosperity) led to a flow of investment in the housing industry. Most people did not earn enough to buy houses, but loans were given out liberally, because they had become speculative products. This fed the housing bubble, encouraging overproduction and the extension of even more loans. Eventually, the whole system collapsed, breaking the chain of debt obligations: when people could no longer pay interests on their mortgage, the institutions that had been speculating on debt found themselves indebted and without sources of income. When states intervened, they bailed out 'the big fish', 'socializing losses' by making people pay through austerity measures.

An unusual book [starting from the format: a short story (Franny) and a novella (Zooey)] by one of my problematic favourites. It revolves around two siblings, with sequential but not completely consistent plot lines. Franny is a literature college student undergoing a crisis about her studies and, indeed, the purpose of life. Zooey is her older brother, who tries to help her with a mix of sarcasm and sweetness, even if he is also himself experiencing similar doubts. They share a relatively complicated childhood, marked the death of two brothers and a home environment oozing intelligence and intellectual engagement, in ways that have perhaps been damaging.

What I found interesting about this odd mix is that both characters move in a space that is halfway between self-conscious, immature pretentiousness and mental illness. Is their crisis of faith (in both culture and spirituality) the typical transformation that many middle-class, highly-educated kids go through, or is it an actual suicidal tendency, as their family history suggests? Did Salinger even know? 

The task of interpretation is made more complex by the narrative framework through which Zooey is told. Although it reads very much like the script for a play, we know the narrator to be Buddy, Franny and Zooey's older brother. Buddy teaches Advanced Writing in a rural college and one of the first things we're told (by Buddy himself) is that his letters are 'overwritten, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative condescending, embarassing - and filled to a surfeit with affection'.  So when occasionally the book displays the same tendencies, should be attribute them to Buddy or Salinger? Similarly, some parts of the dialogue are exhausting to read, circling around the same points over and over. But isn't that exactly what it feels like to trying to talk someone out of depression?